The amount of information on the web is overwhelming, and even though finding content is easy, it is a challenge to turn it into organized, easily retrievable knowledge. You can bookmark hundreds of websites, of course (and frantically browse through them in search of this one specific article, only to get “error 404”), or simply copy-paste some text into Word (and lose the sources forever). Luckily, now you have a third option: you can use Candy.
“With Candy, you can always save exactly that piece of info that you need, and you can organize your stuff in a really flexible system that goes beyond folders and tags – just like your memory does,” says Attila Gajdics, responsible for business development of Candy. Together with Attila Ort, a digital marketing specialist, and Peter Vagvolgyi, a graphic designer, they founded Candy in 2014. Two years later, software developer Peter Adam joined the team as co-founder and CTO.
Recording information with this Google Chrome extension is extremely simple: you highlight the data that matters to you. It can be text, a video, picture, tweet – you name it. This information is saved on a card, called a candy. The card stores not only the data you highlighted, but also the source and author, as well as the whole text of the article (should you need to see that piece of content in wider context) – all accessible even if you’re offline or if the website is down. Candies can be organized into flexible collections and shared through other platforms such as Trello, Slack, Facebook or Twitter. And you know the best thing about Candy? It is simple, elegant and beautiful.
Candy is especially useful during research: when you are trying to understand a topic, writing a diploma thesis, learning for an exam, creating a presentation or planning a trip, it helps you gather all of your knowledge in one place. One of the biggest advantages of Candy is that the credit always goes to the author – there is no risk of his name disappearing somewhere between your copies-and-pastes.
At the moment, Candy is available as an extension to Google Chrome only. The number of active users is estimated at 16,000. Most of them are probably people who work with texts on a daily basis – journalists, students, bloggers – but I can imagine Candy being a game changer for everyone who finds himself guilty of copying info from the web to text documents.
